Linking and checklists could have prevented journalists from Manti Te’o ‘girlfriend’ hoax embarrassment

Journalists who practice thorough linking to provide context and attribution for their stories (two of the four reasons I cited) would have learned pretty quickly that crucial facts about Manti Te’o‘s purported girlfriend couldn’t be verified.

Or journalists following Craig Silverman‘s advice on using an accuracy checklist (or using my checklist, adapted from Craig’s) would have found lots of red flags and no verification. (I’ll concentrate on linking here, but I see points on both of our checklists that might have helped a journalist see that something was wrong.)

If you care about accuracy in journalism and if you want to see an excellent example of journalism (exposing several shameful examples of journalism), read the Deadspin investigation of the Notre Dame football star’s fictitious girlfriend.

It’s a long piece and I’m not going to go through it in detail here, but I encourage you to read all the way through. Deadspin reporters Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey recount in excruciating detail how respected media outlets such as Sports Illustrated and ESPN recounted the tale of Te’O’s girlfriend, Lennay Kekua, who supposedly was injured seriously in a car crash, then later died of leukemia.

Burke and Dickey documented that the woman never went to Stanford, as the media reported, never was in a crash in California. In fact, they debunked multiple statements about her and found no evidence that she existed.

Ross Maghielse, a sports writer, faulted me for criticizing journalists who fell for this. He argued on Twitter that the elaborate hoax might have been hard for a reporter to smoke out in writing a story about Te’o’s grief (I added our full exchange below, among other tweets). I have to agree that Monday morning quarterbacking is often unfair and that we should generally be careful about piling on journalists caught in embarrassing situations (no one knows for sure what we would have done in the same situation). But I believe that we should learn from such mistakes. And the lessons are easy to spot here and they are lessons I’ve been advocating for a while here:

Link to sources that provide verification and context to your stories.

Use a checklist to verify facts and ensure the accuracy of your content.

Either or both of these measures could have saved a lot of journalists from a lot of embarrassment (check out links to “people who never looked up Lennay Kekua” compiled by SBNation’s Spencer Hall).

I’m not sure what the full story is here. Notre Dame says Te’o was the victim of a hoax. I’m skeptical of that explanation. Burke and Dickey reported indications that Te’o might have been aware of the hoax. Burke and Dickey didn’t answer the questions about what happened as well as they documented that Kekua was a hoax and that media fell for the hoax without bothering to verify. I presume they and other media will nail this story down over the next few days.

I won’t claim I would have sniffed out the story as thoroughly as Burke and Dickey did. Their investigation even tracked down the woman whose actual photo was used to give Kekua a bogus face in social media. Simply trying to add a link to tell people who Kekua was (as I did above for Te’o, Burke and Dickey) might not have raised a red flag, because Kekua had a fake Twitter account (since deleted).

But that was about the extent of her digital profile, and anyone writing the stories that were written about her should have found and linked to her obituary. Not finding the obituary should have raised suspicions. And then, when you started digging for more information, the lack of a digital trail should have raised alarms.

Maybe if the girlfriend’s name was supposed to be Jane Smith, it might have been hard to notice that she had no digital footprint. Or maybe if the bogus story were about Te’o’s grandmother (her death, part of the same story, was real), you might think that it’s not outlandish for an older woman to not have much online about her.

But Lennay Kekua is a distinctive name and it’s hard to imagine a Stanford student lacking much digital presence, as Burke and Dickey describe (it’s kinda hard to tell now, what with the 15,000-plus hits you can find for all the bogus accounts of her death and the buzz created by the Deadspin piece). But if you’re the first reporter covering the story of her supposed death, Google her name and obituary, and you’re going right to her obit. If she really died. Who dies without an obituary?

What reporter doing a story where her death is worth several paragraphs (as in this ESPN account) wouldn’t want to read the obit? I’m not suggesting that you’re suspicious at first; I’m sure I wouldn’t have been. But you don’t fact-check just when you’re suspicious. You fact-check because that’s what journalists always do. You don’t have to suspect that Te’o was lying or duped to want to check to be sure the date is right or to want a few more details for the story.

I would have searched for the obit to provide a relevant link to mention with her death. Or to find a few details. Or just to routinely check that I had the facts about her death correct. I wouldn’t start out suspicious, but if I couldn’t find an obit, I’d keep looking. I don’t know when I’d get suspicious, but at that point, I’d sure as hell be looking for verification. I’d Google her name and “crash.” Or her name and Stanford. And as the questions mounted, I’d keep digging.

Here’s the problem: The ESPN story linked above, by Matt Fortuna (whom I’ll tweet inviting comment and add it if he responds), has only one link that I can find, opening a box on Te’o’s football stats. Nowhere did the story link externally to sources that would provide context and attribution. If such links were routinely expected and required in the digital versions of stories, the journalist would have to verify and the red flags would be hard to miss. I didn’t click all the links in the SBNation compilation, but clicked pieces by Sports Illustrated and the South Bend Tribune (the story has been removed since last night when I read it), and neither of them provided links either.

I can anticipate the argument that journalists are overworked and don’t have time to find all these links (it’s alluded to in the Twitter conversation below). Well, lots of journalists are doing good research and finding the links they need to as part of that, so adding the links is a fairly quick step. And where adding links requires searching and reading some more, that’s reporting you should be doing anyway, and we need to find or make time to report stories fully. Journalists are not too overworked to look up the obituaries of supposedly dead people they write about. That’s part of the work, not an added chore. The fairly simple task of adding the link is added but important work.

Two of journalism’s favorite clichés apply here:

If your mother says she loves you, check it out.

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Those are valid points that many people in journalism will focus on in discussing this case. But I want to keep my focus on linking. In the discussion of linking when I blogged last year, some journalists dismissed linking as a matter of courtesy in the blogging culture, not a matter of journalism ethics.

Well, linking is a matter of ethics. The digital version of a story should link to related content. You add links for context (which is a matter of good journalism, but not necessarily ethics). But you link for attribution as well, which is a matter of ethics. (If we link routinely, the lack of links can alert editors to possible cases of plagiarism.) If you routinely add relevant links as you’re writing, it makes your reporting more thorough and more accurate. I can’t count how many times I have found important details as I’ve started adding links. Some of those details have made my reporting more thorough, which is good journalism. Some of those details have helped me spot and correct errors.

And the lack of digital content to link to should always raise red flags.

On a related note: Neither of the pieces I linked above from ESPN or SI had been corrected this morning, though both organizations have home-page stories on the hoax.

Another related note: Outdated content management systems sometimes make linking difficult. This is one more reason to make replacement of those systems an urgent priority (which it should be for many more reasons). And even when linking is difficult, journalists should make it a priority.

Update: I blogged about some tangential obituary matters (prompted by the discussion in the comments about whether a death without an obit was as rare as I thought). I also decided I should check my own linking. Not counting the blog post immediately before this (which was a Storify loaded with embedded tweets), here are the numbers of links in my last five new blog posts (not counting lists of links at the end and bypassing my year-in-review, which was mostly an extraordinary number of internal links): Chuck Hagel, 10; narcissism, 19; beats, 28; plagiarism, 10; what should we stop doing? 18.

Erik Wemple’s There but for for the grace of God … (I thought Erik went light on Sports Illustrated reporter Pete Thamel. I’ve seen Erik work, and he’d have been pushing the reporter to check out the girlfriend and get a story on her.)

34 Responses

One quibble with an otherwise great post: The “Who dies without an obituary?” assumes that everybody will get one, but the poor, the obscure and those in rural areas may never receive that last writeup.

My understanding is that my old shop is unusual (right?) in committing to “write about anyone, regardless of status, who has lived in the Washington area for a substantial part of their life, typically about 20 years.” But even that policy comes with a few further qualifications.

Rural areas have funeral homes and newspapers, so do poor neighborhoods. My question didn’t assume that everyone will get one (though nearly everyone does), but that they are so ubiquitous that the lack of an obituary would be a huge red flag. It might mean the person didn’t exist, as appears to be the case here. But it also might mean the person’s life or death deserves more examination for your story. People who aren’t prominent enough to make the local newspaper or prosperous enough to pay for one (since most newspapers charge) probably get a death notice (name, age, date) somewhere. Many funeral homes run obituaries on their websites. You raise some valid points, but I stand by the question. Absence of an obituary is rare. You think the Stanford paper wouldn’t have an obit on a college student who died?

Steve, with respect: not everyone gets an “obituary.” Not even close. In fact, most newspapers no longer run obituaries — only paid death notices. (A crime, and yet it’s true.) When my older brother, a respected leader in the ADD/ADHD coaching field, died two years ago, without insurance, we all got together to figure out how the family would pay for his funeral. He got a death notice for one reason: because his brother, a newspaper reporter, thought it was important enough to pay for. My brother lived outside Chicago, but it was WAY too expensive to place one in either the Sun-Times or the Tribune. It was $400-$450 that I didn’t have to spend in addition to what I was kicking in towards his funeral expenses. With some careful, word-by-word editing, I was able to get a bare-minimum death notice in the Daily Herald for about $115; the cheapest way I could get my brother up on Legacy.com. If I didn’t work for a newspaper and fully appreciate what having an obit means, I’m not sure I would have gone through it.

No, I hadn’t seen it previously, Steve, but thanks for the link! Interesting reading… I’m pleased to learn that some newspapers still provide free death notices or base-level obits. I know that’s not the case at either the newspaper I work for or the three I dealt with in the circumstance I mentioned above.

An excellent post, Steve. An important point raised within your Twitter convo (which FWIW I raised on Twitter yesterday talking to people) is that there were two levels of verification that might have been expected of the different types of pubs. First, it boggles that SI doesn’t fact-check stories; at the major mags I write for (SELF, More, Nature, Wired), things get gone over with a magnifying glass. I suspect the chief of research at SELF, within Conde Nast, would have asked me for a death certificate; at least, certainly, for an obit. This is especially bizarre since you can be sure SI has people checking their sports statistics. But even for the daily papers (South Bend Tribune, LA Times): No one wanted to advance the story? No one thought to call her family, ask about her, even request a better image? Not even a paper in California? That is bizarrely incurious.

Thanks for pulling this together, Steve. This whole story was a great reminder for my editing class this morning that editors should always ask, “How do we know this?” Your post will be part of our followup discussion.

My first reaction to this hoax was disbelief that no one in the Stanford community or local press – a rival football community perhaps eager to either harness or temper Notre Dame’s publicity from the story – sought to location their student. I honestly don’t get that.

I absolutely agree with the value of checklists and the need for linking and attributions to support facts and build credibility. At the risk of seeming opportunistic (I honestly do believe this applies here,) it’s why I think the Spundge Pro feature that footnotes all linked content is particularly valuable to journalists and bloggers.

[…] “Regret the Error” blog on Poynter. But more important than those great references is this piece Buttry wrote on the actual Te’o story. Some excerpts, but I would encourage you to read the entire post if you find this sort of thing […]

This may be more of an academic issue… but some knowledge of medical conditions and standard treatments might have led to catching this much sooner.

People with leukemia do not necessarily proceed immediately to a bone marrow transplant. Usually the first line of treatment is chemotherapy; transplants tend to be indicated for patients whose cancer doesn’t respond well to first-line treatment, who relapse soon after completing treatment or are considered at high risk of relapse.

I would have questioned the story immediately, based on that detail alone.

[…] This is a guest post by Jeff Edelstein, columnist at the Trentonian (who’s appeared in this blog before), prompted by these tweets and an email exchange following my blog post about linking and the Manti Te-0 story: […]

[…] be able to contextualize the article and make it ‘stronger’. Steve Buttry, for example, refers to the accuracy checklist of Craig Silverman, a vademecum that should accompany the reporter in the […]

[…] A culture of linking will provide more than documentation for users and a deterrent for dishonest journalists. It also will help journalists verify facts and uncover false statements, intentional or deliberate, by sources. For instance, in a show-your-work culture, a journalist would not simply have reported Manti Te’o’s claim that his girlfriend had died. A reporter would have needed a link to the obituary. Failing to find an obituary, the reporter would have dug deeper, seeking other confirmation of the woman’s death or seeking confirmation of her reported accident or her status as a Stanford alumna. Seeking links to any of those purported facts would have started to unravel the hoax. […]

[…] supposed death of Manti Te’o’s fictitious girlfriend routinely linked to related sources. The expectation of linking would have forced those journalists to do a little more research and a little…. If they had started searching for an obituary to link to, or an accident report, or any evidence […]

[…] the nation’s sports media except Deadspin fell for the Manti Te’o girlfriend hoax, I noted that a routine practice linking would have exposed that BS earlier (I don’t know whether the Times fell for the hoax or just didn’t report the […]